Hanukkah on Christmas means enhanced festivities for interfaith families on LI 

Penelope Kalvert has a special request for Christmas Day.

“Latkes for dinner!” the 16-year-old from Dix Hills said one recent December evening as she sat with her family by a fireplace under a mantel displaying a series of homemade Christmas stockings and several menorahs.

The oil-fried potato delights her father makes for the first night of Hanukkah every year may be a staple for Christmas dinner at many Long Island households in 2024. For the first time in 19 years and only the fifth time since 1900, Hanukkah, the eight-day Festival of Lights, will begin at sundown on Christmas Day.

For many interfaith families like the Kalverts, this convergence will not disrupt annual traditions — and some say it enhances the festivities. Families composed of parents of different religions raising their children in one or both traditions — or secularly — have long found their own way to balance or even blend the two celebrations.

Some of those who partake in both holidays refer to their annual celebration as “Chrismukkah.”

DIFFERENT CALENDARS

Long Island religious leaders who promote interfaith bonds view the convergence as an opportunity for folks of various denominations to learn about faiths and traditions different from their own. The two holidays landing on the same date is a coincidence of two calendars — the solar-based Gregorian calendar followed by Christians that begins Jan. 1, and the lunar-based Hebrew calendar, which starts with Rosh Hashanah.

“This is an opportunity to really unite as people in these days of darkness, of war, of division, of separation,” said Irene Failenbogen, an Argentinian-born Jewish cantor who serves as a coordinator of the religious education program at the Interfaith Community of Long Island at the Brookville Church and Multifaith Campus in Glen Head.

The multifaith group will host a Christmas Eve service with candles lit in a menorah and in the hands of parishioners singing “Silent Night.”

“Cosmically and organically this is a wonderful moment for both communities,” said Failenbogen, 58, of Little Neck. “We have to take advantage of it.”

'Miracles of Light'

Like Christmas, Hanukkah is a celebratory affair, but not as sacred a holiday to the Jewish faith as Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

“Hanukkah is a minor holiday,” said Bat-Sheva Slavin, the director of Jewish education for the Center for Jewish Life and Learning at the Suffolk Y Jewish Community Center in Commack. “It’s not in the scripture anywhere. . . . You don’t go to temple to pray for Hanukkah.”

The annual celebration commemorates when the Maccabees recaptured the Jewish temple in Jerusalem, Slavin said. The little oil they recovered inside the temple miraculously provided enough light for eight days, enough time to create more holy oil to keep the menorahs glowing.

While many households celebrate Christmas as a secular holiday, it of course honors the birth of Christianity’s most central figure.

"You’re celebrating the birth of Christ, a whole new Abrahamic religion,” Slavin, 75, of Roslyn, said of Christmas. Hanukkah “has great significance, but not like when Christ was born.”

Despite the differing importance in the two traditions, Long Island’s interfaith families and spiritual leaders have long found that Christmas and Hanukkah celebrations can complement one another.

“Each tradition brings light to the other,” said the Rev. William McBride, a retired Catholic priest, Failenbogen’s husband and her fellow education leader at the Glen Head-based interfaith organization. “Hanukkah and Christmas, they’re both about miracles of light.”

For Christians, Jesus Christ is “the light of the world,” said Richard Koubek, chair of Abraham’s Table of Long Island, a consortium for Long Island’s Christian, Jewish and Islamic communities. In the New Testament, the Star of Bethlehem — also known as the Christmas Star — provided a guiding light for the Three Wise Men to reach the newborn Jesus, he said.  

Balancing act

On Christmas Eve, the Kalvert family will attend the interfaith service in Glen Head. The following morning, they will open Christmas presents, but even without Hanukkah approaching at sundown, Gayle Kalvert said her children — Penelope, Weston, 14, and Colton, 11 — have always had limited time to enjoy their gifts before stashing them away in anticipation of a few dozen guests for Christmas dinner.

The dual Christmas and Hanukkah season — and observing two faiths year-round — is “exhausting,” she said.

“I barely survive, and that’s only because he does the cooking,” she added, pointing to her husband, David Kalvert.

For years, Gayle Kalvert, 47, was responsible for buying and wrapping eight nights of Hanukkah gifts for three children, plus more on behalf of Santa Claus and hiding an Elf on the Shelf daily. But now, her children have outgrown Santa and the little elf, and they unwrap a single Hanukkah present.

“She was so stressed out all the time,” Penelope recalled of her mother during the holidays of her younger years.

With a slightly lighter load and older kids, Gayle Kalvert said she has been able to enjoy the holiday season with more family time to watch their beloved “Frosty the Snowman” several times throughout the season.

Some families say they try to keep things simple. McBride and Failenbogen said they gave each of their two sons one gift during the first night of Hanukkah and another on Christmas morning to unwrap while wearing their pajamas. The musically inclined clan will sing and play their instruments together this Christmas and Hanukkah, tell family and religious stories and watch new and classic films that celebrate both holidays. Their watchlist includes “Full-Court Miracle,” which follows a young and struggling Jewish basketball team that Failenbogen said captures “the spirit of the underdog winning, which is always a beautiful story,” she said parallels with the story of Hanukkah. Also, “The Holdovers,” which follows a high school teacher supervising boarding school students during Christmas break.

The couple said they raised their children to focus on giving back during the holiday season, whether through a donation to charity or baking extra sweets to give to neighbors.

“It was really more family time, really connecting with the spirit of God,” Failenbogen said. 

Setting the table

Hanukkah may not be the holiest of Jewish holidays, but for eight consecutive nights, families across Long Island light candles on their menorahs, recite prayers and songs and eat foods fried in oil. This year, interfaith families traveling for Christmas may have to pack those essentials for the first night of Hanukkah.

“I’m going to bring latkes with some applesauce, some doughnuts, or as we call it, ‘sufganiyah,’ ” said Ladan Shalom-Murray, 62, of Manorville. Every year on Christmas Day, Shalom-Murray, who is Jewish, heads to her in-laws in Connecticut with her husband, Billy Murray, who was raised Catholic.

In addition to traditional delicacies, Shalom-Murray said she will bring a menorah and candles to light. When asked whether her extended family will enjoy her Hanukkah eats, she said, “You bet so!” Combining the celebrations is nothing new for interfaith families like hers.

“Two years ago I had a big Hanukkah party at my house. It was a disco theme,” Shalom-Murray said. “We had a DJ, my brother-in-law was there, dancing. My in-laws have been at my Passover and Rosh Hashanah table.”

Meals prepared for Christmas Eve and Christmas do not typically hold any religious significance, many Long Island interfaith families said, but rather carry a special personal meaning, ancestral or emotional. Gayle Kalvert, her children, her husband and her extended relatives hope to sink their teeth into the sole almond her mother from Norway hides in her riskrem med jordbær, “which is like a sweet rice pudding with strawberries on top,” she said.

“Everybody gets a little bit, and whoever has that one almond wins a prize,” she said. “In Norway it’s traditionally marzipan, but my dad will sometimes give money. That is a highly coveted gift.”

Although the couple is “not terribly religious,” Gayle Kalvert said that when she and David married, they agreed that they wanted their children to “learn about both religions and also understand what we’re celebrating with our respective families.”

“It’s really awesome that I’m married to somebody who’s Jewish and I still get to enjoy the traditions that I grew up with and really loved, and my kids love that too,” Gayle Kalvert added. “Dave can still enjoy things that he loved about growing up Jewish with his family, which is really nice about being both.”

Christine and Ian Newman, an interfaith couple from Dix Hills, have found creative ways to combine important traditions to create a single “magical season” for their girls, Charlotte, 6, and Emma, 3.

Baking cookies of all kinds through December is Christine Newman’s favorite Christmas tradition and one she has passed down to her daughters, she said. Neither she nor her husband, who is Jewish, said they are particularly religious, but their children can recite the prayers every night of Hanukkah, the tradition Ian Newman said he is most proud to have passed down to his girls.

“For Hanukkah, we’ll have surprises on different nights, activities that we want them to do,” said Christine Newman, 37. “Sometimes the Elf on the Shelf gets involved with our holiday traditions. He hangs out and helps light the menorah.”

In the Newman home, Hanukkah and Christmas are melded “unless they fall very far apart,” Christine Newman said. This year, they couldn’t possibly get any closer.

“We’ll probably do the traditional Christmas morning — breakfast, presents — and then after dinner, we’ll do the traditional first night of Hanukkah — lighting the menorah,” she said.

“Perhaps with Christmas dinner there’ll be some latkes involved, dessert could be doughnuts. We’ll definitely blend it together.”

Season of light

McBride, 70, of Little Neck, said he implores his students and others in the community during this time “to recognize who is light for you.” Regardless of faith, he and Failenbogen believe that finding the brightness in one another is essential for not only discovering meaning in the holidays, but surviving the blackness of late fall evenings.

“The darkness of this time really is something that we in general, as humanity, are afraid of and suffer for,” Failenbogen said. “We need as much light as possible. The two holidays together, I think, are embracing the same message in different languages.”